Introduce yourself to your online learners

One of the benefits of a classroom learning experience is being able to see your teacher. It may seem strange but seeing this mysterious person can also add credibility to what you are studying if you know they have a passion and depth of knowledge.

When working with teachers transitioning to the online environment, I encourage them to consider ways they can present themselves to their e-learner. This is particularly important with a new learner group, as first impressions count and this is your opportunity to inspire your new learner into undertaking their studies with you.

This may be as simple as a link to their LinkedIn profile (mine is https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracieregan/) but even better is a short video introducing the course:

Digital teaching practices – welcome from Tracie Regan on Vimeo.

If you aren’t comfortable in front of a camera (and you can see I’m not a professional either), perhaps use a simulation of yourself. Try the app Tellagami https://tellagami.com/ 

or tap into your creative side with a PowToon https://www.powtoon.com/

also read:

https://thejournal.com/articles/2014/06/11/how-to-make-the-most-of-a-video-introduction-for-an-online-course.aspx

 

Learning in holiday mode using Prezi

It’s Easter, and my students are focussing on loading their families, loved ones, friends and selves with chocolate and the occasional hot cross bun (which have been available since Boxing Day!!). Classes are suspended while parents look after their children and school teachers breathe out the stresses of Term 1 and get ready for term 2.

These two weeks of school holidays are preparation time for VET teachers as well, but while we don’t have scheduled classes, students are encouraged to come in and continue their studies using a blended model of support.

My Diploma of Business students are working on the unit BSBRSK501B Manage Risk using this model. To get them started I sent an email advising:

“We are starting this subject next week, and you will continue self-paced over the Easter break – you are welcome to come in to campus or work from home.  To assist you in these studies I have developed a supporting Prezi that provides prompts and focuses your attention to relevant areas of the book to assist in assessment tasks.  You should be able to simply click through, or play the Prezi (requires internet access)https://prezi.com/avxvxm_uc7ni/caution/ ”

Prezi using for blended learning

Students use the Prezi as a structured support tool for their learning.  They can watch the suggested videos to assist in deepening their understanding, and move forward or back through the presentation until they are comfortable with their level of learning.  Students also email me with any questions, schedule a face to face support session with me or support each other via a closed Facebook group (of which I am not included for conduct and privacy reasons.  I don’t mind either as it encourages them to grow and learn using each other’s skills and support).

Does it work? I was pleasantly surprised at their supportive reaction and have already received assessment submissions from pro-active students.  These students mentioned the Prezi gave enough structure for them to confirm they were on the right path and increased their confidence at submitting the assessment.

Flip your class using Prezi and let me know how it works for you!

Welcoming in the new with old manners

TAFE

It’s 2014, and in another week our teachers will be returning from their break to check their lesson plans, resources and class enrolments for an exciting new Term of changing people’s lives in VET (vocational education and teaching).

Before lessons start I would love to create a new inspirational video about our school – I like this one of East Leyden High School, Franklin Park, Illinois, U.S.:

and include in our orientation a reminder to students and staff that one thoughtless, misworded tweet will forever change their lives in a way they could not predict. See the link for what happened 20 December 2013 that resulted in a public apology to an entire country.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alisonvingiano/this-is-how-a-womans-offensive-tweet-became-the-worlds-top-s

In 2014, let’s use old manners with new technology

• Be responsible for your words and actions when online.
• Say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to those you communicate with online.
• Be generous with your praise when giving feedback or reviews.
• Make your presence known and resist the urge to lurk.
• We all have something to contribute – collaborate with a positive attitude.
• Be respectful of other’s content ownership and don’t share/rip/download without permission.
• Do/share one good thing every day.

Lesson Plans for Teaching online

This is part 2 of 3 parts:

1. K.I.S.S. your instructional design,
2. Lesson Plans for Teaching online, and
3. Make assessments S.M.A.R.T.

I’m going over each of these parts separately, as you may only be interested in one part, depending on whether you work at the start of the e-learning cycle, middle, or end 🙂 

I recently spoke with a group of teachers trying to manage their face to face classes with set start and finish dates each term and new responsibilities in teaching and assessing groups of e-learners who can enrol any time.

Fire Alarm

There is a renewed drive to make TAFE courses available online, and with it comes new professional development opportunities for teachers who have to re-think their pedagogy for the first time since completing their own teaching studies.  This is a change management process we can discuss another time.

Given these were experienced teachers, I assumed they has the classroom structure under control. I asked what worried them the most about their new online groups, and the response was “I don’t know when somebody is enrolled until I look at the group membership”, “I can’t manage rolling starts – I spend all my time conducting orientations but not getting to the actual teaching”, “I don’t know where the students are up to in their course”, “How do I manage the expectations of online students with varied learning needs?”, “I teach all day and then open my email inbox to 70 emails all needing my immediate attention”, “It’s so hard to know if the student has completed all assessments to be able to issue their result”.  There were more comments, each spoken with rising panic until I thought we might accidentally set off the fire alarms.

I asked how they manage their students’ learning in the classroom.  Easy.  They had lessonplans for each lesson and a defined start and end date, with assessment due dates and a roll to check where the student’s progress.

Ok, let’s start with the basics.  A class roll.  How does the learning management system (LMS) accommodate this for their e-learners? The class is linked to their student monitoring system – so you can run a class roll for them too? Yes!  What about automated messages to let the teacher know a new student has enrolled? Yes!

Next, lesson plans.  We have them for the classroom, but what about lesson plans for the e-learner?  Yes, there is a study guide so the student knows what activities to complete.  OK, what about a teaching or facilitating guide?   Setting up a plan to teach online will help in managing students’ progress.  You can also check the course has been set up correctly – you kow, with the forums ready for students to post their replies to; chat room topics set; old discussions archived etc.  Set up templates for each week that you can post to the group on a rotational basis.  It doesn’t matter that you post week 5 and the new student is at week 1 – just make sure you are clear in yor message that the direction relates to week 5 of the lesson plan as available in the course. You can access my version of Facilitating BSBSUS201A from this dropbox link: it won’t all be relevant, but will give you a starting point 🙂

https://www.dropbox.com/s/796f2wg3o510d5o/Facilitating%20BSBSUS201A.pdf

I asked the teachers to also consider posting a flipped classroom type orientation video.  This helps introduce and personalise the teacher in an online space, and gives the new student an idea of what to expect. 

introduce yourself

Consider setting up a FAQ area in your course using forums.  Add it to the course overview page and you may find the number of emails diminish as students self-help any questions.

I also suggested a paragraph at the start of the course that provides details for the students of  when their teacher will be available.  If you let them know you can answer their phone calls every Wednesday between 2 – 4pm, a lot of emails will disappear.  Manage their expectations by not promising a 1 hour turnaround for emails – recognise you are busy too.

As far as assessment progress goes, see how your LMS can help. Ours has an Assessment Centre where you can link all assessments and see at a glance whether the student has completed all tasks satisfactorily.

Get to know your students as much as reasonable – you can identify their writing style, voice, and photos from conversations and email exchange.  Sometimes you can Skype and have that face to face conversation.  This helps in buidling a teacher-learner relationship.  Just because they are learning online doesn’t mean they have to be lonely learners.

Good planning by the teacher will save a lot of stress later on.  Just good teaching practices, really 🙂

iAuditor for the automotive industry digital story

As part of our funding closing arrangements, we created a digital story to promote our project. 

To create this visual story of what happened with our project I developed a storyboard which you can find here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/y49gvp48rn4ve6l/ELPAS83%20Digital%20Story.pdf 

This storyboard set out which resources to use, and the narration for the audio, which became the closed captioning text as required for accessability.  We have the Adobe C6 suite installed on our work computers, so I used Adobe Audition 6 to capture the audio.  You can learn how to use this program, or any of the Adobe suite products at http://tv.adobe.com/ (I try to spend an hour every Friday afternoon learning how to use various products – easy professional development training)

You can watch the finished story here:

 

What I didn’t say in the story.

There is always a behind-the-scenes version of any project, and ours had several layers of frustration. 

• The main one was that although this project was initiated by industry, our partner couldn’t find enough interested members to participate.  We had planned for 10 participants and two trial groups – one in the City and one in the regions.
• Our industry partner also didn’t appear to fully understand the concept of co-contribution, and that this meant they had to invest from their own budget as well as the funding arrangements.  They actively sent e-newsletters to their members, but there was no on-the-ground support to ensure planned activities could be realised.  In the end it was our Automotive teacher, Jeff, and his strong industry networks that convinced a local company to participate.
• All small businesses have such tight budgets it is hard to convince them to participate in an un-tried technological project.  Our Institute Director ended up approving the waiver of enrolment fees so that we could get 3 participants to enrol.
• The automotive industry is still on a technology learning curve, and this project may have been ahead of current confidences. 
• Megan, our business teacher, worked many uncosted hours to learn the technology and be confident in front of industry when they met.  She had never used an iPad before, but soon championed the benefits.  She also had to learn to present using a webinar, and to customise her RPL documents to Performax’s business.
• The Bundaberg natural disasters of January 2103 meant our campus was the base for Community Recovery efforts for several months.  Project members were personally affected and local automotive business struggled to keep their doors open – let alone participate in a project not considered core business.

We had confidence in our project though, and this gave us sustained energy to meet these challenges and our project’s deliverables. 

Sustainability

Performax are using the iAuditor app for their 5S quality checks (read about 5 S here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology) and Wide Bay TAFE are investigating using this app for the quality documents when off the network to lower their carbon footprint.

Do you Vimeo?

Following on from the previous post of making printed course resources interactive, I thought I would make a short video using my iPhone and upload it to this wordpress site in my allocated media files area.  Then I would create a QR code linking the url of the media file.

Then WordPress inserted a ‘But…’  It’s a simiar story when I try to embed an Audioboo.

I have to upgrade to use video, or upload video.  I understand about server space and all that, but sometimes free blog sites are just so limiting, and I am not willing to commit to an annual (and no doubt increasing) fee to maintain one.  So I looked around for a suitable (read ‘free’) video sharing site.

The one most recommended, and used by many industry websites too, is Vimeo https://vimeo.com/

So I have joined Vimeo, and created a channel, regant (follow me if you like).  I’ve linked my new video to a QR Code using qrstuff.com and then added this image to the course flyer. 

You can download the interactive flyer from my Dropbox Public folder and now I can email it to interested course participants 🙂  Yes, it’s not a prefessional video, but it’s a start 🙂

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/n8th4rn9d7oerpz/yoKBHl_Ex9

Vimeo NWP279

Add a welcome video to your course promotional material

Do you still print business cards to hand out to your networks or to new clients?  Perhaps you have a course flyer that can be downloaded from your website or Learning Management System.  Even current students want to know what further studies may be available, and this is great because once you are in the study habit you should continue as the hard bit of learning how to juggle life, work and study has been achieved when you receive your first record of result.

With Augmented Reality (AR) you can make almost any printed resource interactive.  There are a couple of ways you can do this:

• Use your smart phone to create and upload a video to YouTube of yourself introducing the course and what learning outcomes students can expect.  Then create a QR code image that links to this video.  I use http://www.qrstuff.com/ for fast and easy QR codes 🙂 Add this video to your course flyer to give it a personal touch.  This is even more important for your distance students if the course is delivered via e-learning and they don’t come to class.
• Download your preferred AR app (mine is Aurasma http://www.aurasma.com/#/whats-your-aura  – you can join them as an educational partner so you can publish your auras (learn more about this in some of my previous posts)). Attach your video as an aura to your business card so it can be accessed by anyone who has your card and the app.  That is pretty cool 😀
• Create a AR business card for yourself.  You can use a couple of apps for this, such as YPrintit http://yprintit.com/ or CamCard Lite (which is the one I have) http://www.lifeofandroid.com/apps_review_detail/camcard-lite-business-card-r/ If your network also uses the same app, you can share your cards and watch each other’s videos (this would make a great introductory project for an e-commerce student)

OK, now we know how to do it, I’ll add a couple to some resources and share back here when done.

AR Tagxedo created from words in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality

the 2012 printed e-learning book

Did you know the internet is only old enough to be a Uni-graduate?

In 1992 forty-seven country domains were registered (but not the ‘.au’ for Australia) and if you lived in regional Australia and enrolled in study you were probably sent a printed workbook as a learning resource and a phone number for your distance education teacher. 

page 4

The workbook looked a lot like this and if you were lucky your teacher returned your call a week after you left a message (but you were likely outside doing something and missed their call).  Learning could be a pretty lonely experience.

Then in the early 2000s the world wide web spread across Australia and electronic learning was developed; where you could log into a learning management system, read text online and email your teacher.  Sometimes the technology wouldn’t work that well in regional areas and you would be posted the printed workbook after all.

By 2005 there was so much on the internet you couldn’t decide where to go first.  E-learning was good, but easily distracted and fragmented in its approach.   Often you found something new simply by accident (hence the name StumbleUpon) and if it was considered interesting to others you might share it on your brand-new Facebook or Del.icio.us account.

 ‘Facilitated learning’ and ‘self-directed learning’ became an expectation.

Adobe elearning mindmap

You really wanted to just hold a printed book.

sourced from http://www.flickr.com/photos/chingchong/ photostream 26 Aug 2012

So, in 2012 we have a new type of printed book for the connected regional student…one that is co-authored by global specialists, includes instructional video, live discussions and compares what you see against what it should look like. 

Here, let me show you…

…to be presented at TEDx Gympie – 23 October 2012 http://www.tedxgympie.com/

Bringing life to your e-learning text resource

So many e-learning courses are just online content.  I always think of self directed learning through pages of online text and images as not ‘e-learning’ but an ‘online course’.  You have to be pretty motivated to worth through all of it and feel like it added value to your life.

One of this year’s industry partnership projects has been to develop an e-learning course for the coal seam gas sector on surface water management.  It is mostly legislation and stuff, and unless this floats your boat, can be pretty boring.

You can read about this project here:

http://industry.flexiblelearning.net.au/index.php/Business-Examples/coal-seam-gas-surface-water-management-2011-2012.html

One of the initial pages for learning looked like:

NWP415 legislation

Another 20 pages of this stuff would have sent an insomniac to sleep.

While the project is to use innovation learning tools that might enjoy bigger bandwidths under the National Broadband Network, the reality is all learning technology must be relevant to the learning, not driven by the technology.

To make loads of text interesting to the learner we used a combination of presentation tools.  Prezi (read my previous post on this), video and text-to-speech animation programs.

One of our favourite text-to-speech animation programs is Crazy Talk. With a text alternative for accessibility, this brings life to your long text.

NWP415 Crazy Talk

You need to use around 3 different voices and images though or it might end up like a meditation track 🙂

Flipped classrooms: perfect for VET

TED-Ed supports the new strategy of Flipped Classrooms – It is called the flipped class because the whole classroom/homework paradigm is “flipped”. What used to be classwork (the “lecture”) is done at home via teacher-created videos/podcasts and what used to be homework (assigned problems) is now done in class. The Kahn Academy, started for maths instructional videos is the world leading site for these flipped class resources.

Of course like a lot of new things, it isn’t really new, just re-named.

Back in 2005 I helped design e-learning resources for bulk water operators in the QLD water industry.  The strategy was to provide online learning so they could learn when convenient at work or at home, then schedule discussions in the workplace for tutorials.  I must be flipped before my time. 🙂

YouTube

YouTube is a great way to promote your class activities – ask Innovations for help on music copyright, use of images of students and how to create an appropriate video file so it can be shared easily.

WBIT have created a series of instructional videos on our YouTube channel ‘widebaytafe’ to assist staff in using various technologies (thanks Paul).  These videos include:

Adobe help

• Acrobat Digital Signature @WBIT : to create a new digital signature to electronically sign a PDF document

iConnect help

• iConnect Login @WBIT : this provides step by step instructions on joining an iConnect session
• iConnect Audio Wizard @ WBIT: how to check your speakers and microphone work correctly when participating in an iConnect session – a ‘Skype ready’ computer headset is great for this activity (about $10 from Big W)

My.TAFE help

• Logon to my.Tafe @WBIT : this can be useful to send to a new student of a my.TAFE space for help in how to log in
• my.tafe Teacher Share Space @WBIT : instruction on using the Teacher Share Space of your my.TAFE group
• Posting a new thread to a forum in my.Tafe @WBIT : Forums are an easy way to set up an FAQ area for your course
• Subscribing to a my.tafe forum via email @WBIT : Never miss a forum post again!

Podcasting

• Soundrecorder on Windows 7 @WBIT : create a sound file you can share – it’s so easy! You do need a microphone though

TeacherTube: http://www.teachertube.com/

Have you joined Teacher Tube yet?  This site was set up for sharing teaching resources – there are videos, documents, audio and photos and communities of practice.  Look for the channel  ‘College and University’.  The resources on this site can be downloaded and customised to your own needs (it would be good practice to then re-share with the members)

TED-Ed: http://ed.ted.com/tour

TED-Ed supports the new strategy of Flipped Classrooms  You can use, tweak, or completely redo any lesson featured on TED-Ed, or create lessons from scratch based on any video from YouTube.

Wordle created from text in the Flipped Classroom article.